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Avengers

Last night Krystal and I went to see the Avengers and it was pretty decent. Everyone is praising it as the greatest super hero movie ever made, and to be honest they’re probably right. I’m just hard to please, especially when it comes to movies, so here are a few things that irked me.

First and foremost was the ending battle with alien invaders. A never ending stream of the guys are just pouring into Manhattan while the Avengers do their best to put them down. Okay, cool, very climatic. Here’s the thing. There are a lot of other super heroes in the Marvel universe who would have shown up very quickly to do their part in the event of a catastrophe of this scale. I realize this is a movie about the Avengers and tossing in Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, and the X-men would have cheapened that, but maybe somebody should have thought about that before introducing something quite so large as a massive alien incursion into New York. The aliens could have just as easily invaded some other city with a lower density of readily at hand heroes and this wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much.

Another thing that bothered me was how quickly they glossed over Thor’s return to Earth. At the end of his movie they made a big deal about him not being able to get back to Earth because the Bifrost was destroyed. Then when he pops back in to capture Loki and take him back to Asgard there is only a single line of dialogue explaining his presence. While I won’t deny that there wasn’t really room in the film for a long winded explanation of how he got there, a little more effort could have been put into it. Hell they took the time to explain where Natalie Portman’s character was at and why she didn’t appear in the film, and frankly I don’t think I’m the only one who wouldn’t have cared if they’d decided to leave that out entirely. Thor has better things to do than go checking in on her, so it would have made plenty of sense to gloss over that.

The film starts out with Loki coming to earth and through his newly acquired made spear taking control of several S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel including Hawkeye. To me this just felt like an easy way to write Hawkeye out of the first half of the film. Any agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. could have been taken by Loki in his place and the film could have played out exactly the same (with the exception of one particular piece of bullshit that I won’t go into.)

Lastly, at the end, after all kinds of build up about how unstoppable and uncontrollable the Hulk is, and an incident where he had no trouble what so ever attacking the others, Bruce Banner willfully transforms into the Hulk and for no apparent reason is suddenly able to exercise control over whose face the Hulk decides to stomp. The Hulks sudden ability to differentiate between friend and foe is just foisted upon you and you’re excepted to swallow it without question. He even gets his hands on Loki at one point, smacks him around a bit, then decides to walk away leaving Loki battered but free to get up and do as he pleases. Granted by the time Loki comes back to his senses the others are on hand to apprehend him, but there’s a pretty big span of from between Hulk smashing him and them taking him into custody during which he could have easily just walked (limped) away.

Over all it wasn’t a bad movie. The action was pretty smooth with everyone getting their fair share of screen time with the possible exception of Hawkeye, but let’s be honest, who cares about Hawkeye anyway? The in fighting may have been taken to a bit of an extreme, but really it was fairly entertaining watching Ironman smack Thor around and even more so watching Thor smack the Hulk around.